Wireless Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dennis
  • Start date Start date
D

Dennis

I want to know if its possible to use a wireless
connection with a laptop without having a broadband
connection. I have a desktop with dial up running XP home.
If I had a router connected to the desktop via an ethernet
card and had a wireless card in my laptop. Would I be able
to connect to the internet via my laptop if I was signed
on to my dialup connection on my desktop? I was told that
I would have to have broadband in order to go wireless on
my laptop. I have about another 9 months left on my dialup
contract until I could go broadband. I really do not do
much if any downloading from the internet so speed would
be of no big concern as I use the laptop just to access
web sites and brouse them. Thanks for your time!
 
Dennis,

First off, you're in the wrong group - try posting your wireless questions
in the microsoft.public.windows.networking.wireless

Second, to answer your general question - yes, you can use dialup and
wireless together. You don't need broadband, to go wireless. For most
people, this is the best combination. I believe, though I'm not totally
familiar w/ XP Home as I am w/ XP Pro, if XP Home has the Internet Sharing
Connection feature or not. If it does, you're best to turn that on as well.
Hope that helps.

Doug
 
Dennis -

Yes, you can certainly do this...I'm connected from a
wireless laptop right now to my desktop system, which is
in turn connected to the Internet via dial-up. I have a
wireless router/hub attached to a network adapter in the
desktop. Both systems are running XP pro, but I believe
the desktop could be running XP home, 2000, or even
Win98SE (i.e., any version that supports ICS "Internet
Connection Sharing").

Here's how it's set up. The first thing you want to do
is disable DHCP on the wireless router/hub. Then change
the wireless router/hub's IP address to something in the
192.168.0.X range, where X is between 2 and 255. (ICS
will force the desktop system's IP address to be
192.168.0.1, so you need to be in the same range, but not
conflict with this specific address.) Now enable ICS on
the desktop system, which has a modem and is configured
to dial my ISP as the default dial-up connection.
(Enable ICS by clicking Start | Connect To | Show All
Connections, right-click the ISP dial-up connection,
click Properties | Advanced and check the "Allow other
network users to connect..." and "Establish a dial-up
connection whenever..." boxes, then click OK.)

On the laptop side, configure the wireless card to get
its IP address automatically. Although the wireless
router/hub is no longer a DHCP server, the desktop
computer with ICS is. Restart everything, and when you
start IE on the laptop, the desktop system should
automatically dial your ISP and share the connection with
the laptop.

I still haven't quite figured out how to tweak the
timeouts so that IE will not timeout during the initial
dialing period. At the moment, I just hit Home after a
few seconds, and everything's fine after that.

Hope this helps.
 
There is no such newsgroup as "microsoft.public.windows.networking.wireless"
as found in my public Bellsouth newsgroup server, just an FYI

Jim N.
 
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